


The Path Ahead

by samariumwriting



Series: Trans Claude AU [3]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Mild Blood, Pre-Canon, Spoilers, Trans Claude von Riegan, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 15:09:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20260117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: In short, Claude had messed up. He'd overshot Derdriu slightly, he'd run out of money, and apparently 'hunting on other people's land' was a crime. It was in that rather unfortunate position that he ran into a woman called Judith, and a strong partnership was born.





	The Path Ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This fic stands alone from the rest of the series I have, but if you like trans Claude content and want some more trans-focused stuff, the two preceding fics are much more focused on that
> 
> As a note, this contains spoilers for some pretty hefty chunks of Claude's backstory, so if you don't know his full story then you might not want to read this. Otherwise, there's a liberal serving of speculation/headcanon pieced together with information from his supports.

Okay, he might have messed up a tad. Just a little bit. Maybe he hadn’t thought much further than ‘I need to cross the mountains to Fódlan’ and ‘mother says her brother and father live in Derdriu’. He’d thought that anywhere would be better than Almyra. Anywhere at all.

Turned out, the Leicester Alliance was pretty cold, in more ways than one. When he’d been closer to the border, everyone watched him with wary eyes. Even when he still had some money, he’d been refused a room in an inn and he was pretty sure it was because of what he looked like.

Now, he was a bit further west. People didn’t look at him with hostility, more curiosity. The only problem was that he no longer had any money (sometimes when you were running away from bandits in the middle of the night you forgot things, okay?) and local lords didn’t much like it when you hunted for food on the ‘land they owned’. As if anyone really owned land.

So, he might have been chased off Riegan lands by an angry man with a bow who was probably a better shot than he was. And now he didn’t exactly know where he was going, because he was worried that someone might have reported him for a crime or something like that and he didn’t want to take that risk too soon.

He’d ended up even further west (which was colder still, and he wished he’d had the foresight to buy a coat when he still had money), which was fine for now. The land in Fódlan was full of so much life, so he didn’t spend much time going hungry. He knew enough about fending for himself by now. He just...didn’t have much of a plan.

It was better, he supposed, than being the princess of Almyra. He didn’t care for the title, or anything that came with it. Things were simpler on his own, not having to worry about who was going to make the next comment about him being too close to the enemy or where the next dagger would come from. He just had to think about when he’d next eat, where he was going to sleep, if he should venture into the closest town and offer to do some work for somebody.

It was simpler, and maybe happier, but it was lonely. He wasn’t achieving anything by sitting under a shelter made of branches and leaves, roasting mushrooms and berries and the occasional rabbit. He’d sort of hoped that he could make a difference in Fódlan somehow, or at least that he’d find somewhere to belong here.

He just wanted to be Claude, his mother’s son, nephew to the heir of the Alliance. He wanted to see where that would take him in the future. What he could do with that kind of connection to this place he’d never even seen before now. Right now, he could do exactly nothing.

That all changed rather quickly, though, as he gravitated further towards the towns in the territory he’d made his temporary home (he needed a better word than home. This wasn’t a home. Almyra wasn’t home either). He knew it was dangerous, and that people often called hunting ‘poaching’, but if he was being honest, he would prefer to take the risk if it meant he could talk to people. He was lonely like this.

He tried to make an attempt at hunting every day. It was difficult, in wooded areas, when he was used to isolated target practise or perhaps hunting on the plains. On that particular day, he’d spotted some wild pigs. There were a few of them, and he was worried about the boar, but if he could get a couple of the young ones then he could dry the meat out and he’d be set for ages.

The problem was luring the boar away. He wasn’t an experienced hunter, but he knew enough about wild animals to know that confronting it with a weapon was a bad idea. That thing could run him right through, easily. And without money or company, if he got injured out here in the wild he was as good as dead.

He tried throwing rocks to get it to investigate, but every time the little pigs followed. He was just about ready to give up when felt a slight movement in the earth. He squatted lower, pressing his hand to the ground. Hoofbeats. A horse then, definitely more than one of them. Probably three.

The boar looked up. It had felt the hoofbeats too. The problem was, it looked up and directly at him. Yikes. Claude drew his dagger from his belt. If he were further away he could have attempted to shoot it, but he wasn’t further away. He was dangerously close, and the people approaching were dangerously close too.

He shifted into a better stance as the boar let out a grunt and started moving towards him. Just as he was about to jump to the side, three horses emerged through a gap in the trees, and the boar twisted to avoid them. This, of course, screwed up his whole dodge and the boar’s tusk caught him just below the knee.

Claude wasn’t quite sure what happened next. There was pain, a whole lot of it, and he definitely thrust his arm holding the dagger down. There was a flash of light, but maybe that was the pain playing tricks on him, and then the pain dulled, or maybe he was just passing out.

There was sound around him, and he was lying on the ground, and skies above his leg hurt like anything. But he gritted his teeth and didn’t cry, because one of the strangers had got off their horse and was walking towards him. “Care to explain what I just saw there?” she asked.

“You got me impaled by a boar?” he tried. He’d been hunting, and he wasn’t allowed to hunt on ‘other people’s land’. He knew that, and this woman looked like she was pretty important.

“Among other things,” she said. She was looking at him with a strange look on her face. She was curious about something. Confused, too. He couldn’t work out about what. “I think you have some explaining to do, young lady.”

“Man,” he corrected reflexively, under his breath. He didn’t correct people to their faces normally but he was in pain, he couldn’t stop himself. He got another look from the woman. Intrigued was the way he’d describe it, but maybe that was wishful thinking.

“Okay, boy, what’s your name?” she asked, offering him a hand. Claude tried to quash the thrill that came with being called a man, in a roundabout way. He was in a bad situation right now. He probably shouldn’t be excited. “Can you stand? That tear looks pretty bad.”

Claude bit down slightly on his lip and made an attempt at standing, taking her offered hand. It burned like anything, but he managed to stay upright. “Claude,” he said. He’d been calling himself that for so long, but it was still strange to say it aloud. And he’d managed to forget the way people from Fódlan combined names and titles, so that was a great start.

“You have a second name, Claude?” she asked. There was an inflection to her tone that told him she knew that wasn’t the name he’d been given. Still, something inside him sparked with happiness when he heard someone else say his name.

“Um.” He should have prepared answers to these kinds of questions long ago. But here he was, a fool, and he hadn’t, so he’d have to roll with it. He couldn’t say the last name he’d been given from his father. “Riegan.”

The woman laughed. “Pull the other one, boy,” she said. “But given your Crest, consider my curiosity piqued. I trust you can ride a horse?” He nodded, and the woman looked to the two others she’d been riding with. “Harold, you can ride with him, he needs medical attention. Marisa, if you could bring the boar back with us? We wouldn’t want the kill to be for nothing.”

And that was how he ended up sitting on a horse with a stranger, his leg bleeding into the strip of cloth he’d tied around it, led by a woman who hadn’t even introduced herself. Safe to say, he didn’t have a clue what was going on right now, and he didn’t like it. But at the same time, it was thrilling.

It turned out that the woman who’d managed to catch him hunting in ‘her land’ was the person who governed the region. Her name was Judith, and she had a lot of questions for him. A lot. There was clearly something she knew that he didn’t, or something she thought he knew, because he was completely baffled for the whole of their ride back.

When they’d arrived at her home (it was a manor house, just in case the important person message hadn’t sunk in yet), she’d immediately sent him off with a servant waiting at the entrance to get his leg patched up. Claude was glad for it, but wary, especially when the person healing him said the wound had partially closed already. Something was going on.

When he was patched up, he was escorted once more by a servant to another room, where Judith was sat down. She indicated the chair opposite her, and when Claude stepped forwards, the servant who’d guided him to the room left, shutting the door and leaving them alone. He felt very exposed.

Hesitantly, he sat down, and Judith didn’t smile, launching straight into what was practically an interrogation. “So, Claude, how did you come to be hunting in my estate?” Okay, start with the easy question. So far so good, he supposed.

“I walked there,” he said. Briefly, the reminder he always got at home from his father not to be so cheeky crossed his mind, but he ignored it. He could do what he wanted. “And I need food to live.”

“A Riegan needs to steal from someone else’s land to live, does he?” she asked. Claude didn’t know if admitting that he had no idea what ‘being a Riegan’ actually meant. He was sadly clueless about Alliance nobility, other than the short and decidedly not flattering stories his mother had told him.

“Does land really ‘belong’ to anyone?” he asked with a hand wave. “Or would you have people starve with food right in front of them?”

“I don’t have the time or the patience to have a debate with you on the ethics of land ownership,” Judith said. “I’m afraid I’m rather a busy person and I’m not here to hear this. Why, specifically, are you, someone claiming to be a Riegan, in my territory? There is no Riegan child.”

“Well, someone chased me out of Riegan land when I was trying to eat there,” he said with a shrug, “so I presumed I wasn’t welcome. I doubt telling them I’m a long lost member of their family would go down that well in that kind of circumstance.”

“You’d be right,” she said, and there was a dark note in her tone that immediately told Claude that something was wrong with what he’d said. He knew his mother hadn’t really contacted her family, and maybe they’d decided to keep things hidden, but… No, there was nothing he could really conclude from all that. “So, what kind of woman did he sleep with? From the look of you, probably some woman while on a military campaign...”

“I-” he frowned. He didn’t understand the question in the slightest. Unless she meant…maybe she thought his father was the one from Fódlan. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t tell anyone where she’d gone, if I ever spoke to people who knew her.”

“Your mother,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “What’s her name?”

Claude maybe should have discussed the boundaries his parents wanted set up between them and him if he ever went to Fódlan, but he hadn’t wanted to ask too many questions about it in case they worked out that he was seriously considering it. He was regretting that, now, when he didn’t know if they’d be okay with him revealing who she was. “Her name is Helena,” he said.

“I see,” Judith said. There was a strange look on her face again. She was...excited, but also sad? “I didn’t know she’d had a child. Prove it.”

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that,” he said with a shrug. How could he prove it, if not through getting her here to say he was related to her? Neither of them wanted that. “Any suggestions?”

“Tell me where she’s been,” Judith said. “And why it was so pressing that she didn’t tell a single soul before she left.”

He pulled a face. “I promised-”

“That you wouldn’t tell me where she’d gone, yes, I know,” Judith said. “And you’re a good little kid who won’t tell on her. But you can tell me why she didn’t say anything, and maybe that will be good enough to convince me.”

Claude sort of wanted to say that he could make anything up and she’d have no way of telling if it was the truth or not, but he didn’t feel like digging himself a deeper hole. “I crossed Fódlan’s Throat to get here, as I’m pretty sure you already worked out,” he said. “She did the same, what, fifteen years ago? If she’d told anyone, she never would have been able to go.”

Judith frowned, shook her head, and then sighed. “I suppose she was always bound to do something like that,” she said. “She’s a fantastic woman. Utterly terrifying if she didn’t like something, but fantastic all the same.”

Claude laughed. Whenever this woman had known his mother, well...she hadn’t changed much since. He was still- he still felt bitter towards her sometimes. She was part of the reason he’d decided to leave, as was almost every part of Almyra. He loved it, he loved her, but he…

“You don’t look much like her,” Judith commented, interrupting his train of thought. Funny, that, because back in Almyra everyone said that he looked exactly like her and nothing like his father. “But I see her in that wicked grin.”

He shot her a half smile and twisted his hands in his lap. So that was established. But what came next? She’d caught him doing something he really wasn’t meant to on ‘her land’. What did she do about that? Did this information change anything?

“Tell me, Claude,” she said, “what do you know about House Riegan right now?” This sounded like it was going to lead into something, and he couldn’t help but be sort of excited.

“Not much,” he admitted. “My mother told me that her father was the Duke and she had an elder brother who would inherit the title but not much else.” He’d heard funny childhood stories, and legends of Fódlan, and tales of the Officers Academy where his mother had been educated, but little else about his family here.

“Well, if I’m going to introduce you to your grandfather then you have a hell of a lot to learn, boy,” she said. She stood up, and motioned for him to do the same. “I know I mentioned my name earlier, but I’m Judith von Daphnel. You need a haircut and a proper meal first, boy, but I think we have quite the interesting future together.”

**Author's Note:**

> Judith said trans rights
> 
> Thank you for reading! :) if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment. I really want to write some more Claude backstory stuff and I thought this'd be a nice place to start and it was pretty fun. I am 100% willing and eager to take requests on scenarios for trans Claude fics, so please let me know either in the comments or at my twitter (@samariumwriting) and I'll whip something up!


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